You Live in Three Different Worlds
Sifting the Truth from World Zero, the Imagined, and the Mediated
Imagine a fantasy realm where nobody is content to live a single life at a time. Everybody is conscious of multiple worlds that are like twisted skeins of truth, a roiling rope of realities. What kind of planet would you use as a setting?
I would use Earth, because we are those people, even though we don’t realize it. We are so embedded in a conscious labyrinth that we fail to notice it.
I have often written about a key insight from current philosophy (e.g., Metzinger‘s The Ego Tunnel’): that “the brain creates consciousness as a model of its own activity.” This in effect creates our experienced world, and in a sense, it is a sort of wholeness.
“… we experience a world, inside and outside of our bodies, that is a unified whole. … conscious of the immediate present … [yet] not aware of the fact that we simulated it” — Consciousness, Spirit or Simulation
So if consciousness is only a single, unified whole how can I claim that we live in more than one world? I can explain it in two ways. Firstly, once you have evolved a brain that is a conscious world generator, it can branch out and use new kinds of input to make new worlds. Secondly, it’s like consciousness is a rubber sheet that can fold itself so that different worlds can exist in parallel.
Base Reality and Its Cousins
Whew! For that to make any sense at all, we have to start with Metzinger’s “world zero hypothesis.” It says that the brain assumes that there is one ongoing train of experiences, one subjective world, that is the real one.
I can imagine that if I jump upwards I will keep floating in the air. This happens in dreams because there it doesn’t matter whether it’s ‘real’. But if I am awake and imagine the same thing then I know that floating away like a dandelion seed is not an option in World Zero, the world model that depicts the world in which I have to live.
“Waking consciousness is a dream, but one that happens to correspond to reality … Our eyes, ears, skin, noses … have been tuned by evolution so finely that the dream of our life correlates with the state of the world. “ — Enter the Supersensorium — Erik Hoel
This knowledge that I must come down when I go up is simply a given in my consciousness. Exceptions can occur if I am in an altered state, like being high or psychotic, that keep me from accessing World Zero.
But here is the fun part. I can suspend my use of the World Zero model simply because I want to imagine something different, or because I have voluntarily accepted someone else’s imagining for a while. So, all of us are conscious of three realms of experience: (a) base reality AKA World Zero, (b) the realm of our own firsthand imaginings, and (c) the realm of secondhand, mediated experiences, such as our responses to writing, music, visual and performance art, games and VR.
We can only generate or understand first- and second-hand experiences by reference to World Zero, because they extend or elaborate upon base reality. So, I like to think of them as derivatives of World Zero. They are each their own kind of reality, but we also tangle them up with base reality. We often start thinking that a certain thing is true in base reality because of experiences in the other realms. More on that later.
There is nothing very controversial about this division of consciousness. Most anyone who is fairly well-adjusted to World Zero would agree that in some sense there are these three realms and that they are intertwined in our minds.
Some will argue for adding to the collection yet other, more transcendent realms, and some of those will want to say that World Zero is not even our fundamental, base reality. But really, World Zero is the place where we live, survive, thrive, and die. It’s pretty indispensable, and that is why Metzinger, among other philosophical realists, thinks that it is fundamental.
The Worlds of Consciousness
Let’s call them worlds instead of realms. World Zero can be termed W0. The imagined (firsthand) world can be W1. And the mediated world, handed to us by other people, is W2. Let’s be audacious and try to characterize each of them.
W0 is gloriously fractal. An attentive walk in nature can show this. It is also immediately in-your-face real, and hyper-social , and the most consistently trustworthy and shareable with others, because it is crystalized — it stays put even when you are in W1 or W2.
W1 includes your memories (thoughts about your past), your daydreams, imaginings, and ruminations about your future, the dreams you have at night, and, more rarely, visions and hallucinations. Its unbounded variety comes from the recursive unfolding of words and symbols into some things that could be a part of some W0, and some things that might be or could never be. Even though W0 is your own private model of base reality, it is W1 where you feel the most ownership and agency. As in the common defiance, “Nobody can tell me what to think!” W1 is where you narrate the life story that makes you an individual. It’s where you make the attitudes and plans with which you greet W0 every morning.
W2 is the world where we, now more pliant than defiant, let others suggest what we ought to think. Much has been said about how mediators (such as artists, authors, directors, and VR modelers) and media, in general, can influence their audiences. Less has been said about the nature of being in W2. Even when you are very deliberate in picking a mediated experience, you must, for it to be an experience, open yourself up to being affected or influenced.
Once they are given that tacit permission, mediated experiences can be very absorbing. Some people seem to need an ongoing W2 experience, such as a video feed or background music, so they can do other things. Most of us find it hard to ignore an active video screen within view. And they are in view, from doctors’ offices to bars to gas pumps. In fact, most of us are open to being directed, via media, what to experience a lot of the time. We are not as autonomous or inner-directed as we like to think.
This contradiction helps to explain something commonly said by people who have poisonously fringe or demonstrably false beliefs. They admonish us to “Do your own research.” What they mean by this is to prowl the internet for sources that agree with their conspiracy theories. People find this ‘evidence’ and they own it because they made the effort while remaining unaware of their own credulity.
W2 is also the realm of parasocial relationships: where you imagine that you are that celebrity, authority figure, or fictional character who fascinates you.
Getting Stuck
Yes, the boundaries of these three worlds are porous, and they all are experienced in one place; your mind. But they can be almost independent in extreme cases, where someone gets stuck in W1 or W2 much of their waking life.
“For the past 30 years I’ve been living in an alternate reality that has completely taken over my life. … Long past the point of being a joyful fantasy, it’s become an addiction that I have unlimited access to.” — from Wild Minds Network, a forum for compulsive fantasizers
Being mired in W1 is known as maladaptive daydreaming. It’s “not an officially recognized condition,” but the forum has around 7,000 members from over 70 countries. One study says that the pandemic lockdown has made sufferers’ symptoms worse.
Most of us don’t go from sometimes having our heads in the clouds to not being able to come down. In fact, it would seem like a lot of mental work to be constantly fantasizing. So, compared to W1, getting stuck in W2 takes less effort. W2 comes to you ready-made.
With the internet, our access to media has simply exploded. Erik Hoel calls it a supersensorium, a gigantic collection of stimulation that we are hard-wired to seek out. Movies were the first to exploit our dopamine-fueled craving for novel input. Television though, because of its wider availability, hypnotized us with effortless access to novel scenes and points of view changing by the minute. Soon music videos exploited the quick cut to a kind of upper limit, where a new scene comes before you can interpret the last.
And all of that was nothing — zippo — compared to streaming media, social media, video on anything imaginable, realistic interactive games, instant audiovisual presence at any event anywhere, and contact with anyone wherever and whenever. Hyperlinks: we don’t even notice them but they offer godlike power in a fingertip. Hoel reported that in 2018 we were “engaged with media” 11 hours a day.
It’s provocative to call something we all do all the time an addiction. It seems more like a species characteristic. Nevertheless, there are over a million Google hits on “social media addiction” alone. Our epigram, our value statement might be “W2 are us,” or more warmly, “We are W2.” Some of us are definitely addicted, but most of the rest are circling the whirlpool. By contrast, engagement with W0 becomes more and more like therapy: mindfulness, forest bathing, and the like.
How can you handle the truth when you can’t even find it?
Currently, information has never been more available, but reality is something subject to whim and is shared only with a specific social circle. Truth cannot be told from wishful thinking and lies.
Certainly, there are valid philosophical disagreements about “reality” and “truth” as deep concepts. But what we have now is practical chaos, a culture at great risk but paralyzed by factions and fantasies.
Among many others, I have written about the many symptoms of our lost ability to collaboratively interpret reality. We don’t have even basic knowledge about how we judge something to be real. Cynical sociopaths manipulate our beliefs to mold us into mobs. We inherited a cultural distrust of others from long-since-resolved conflicts in the seventeenth century. We believe in the agency of things that don’t exist or aren’t capable of it. We think that the other side doesn’t deserve to be called human. We can’t fix systemic problems because we are too busy finding someone to blame.
Reality, Truth, Trust, and Belief
Would recognizing that we live in three worlds somehow benefit us? As far as I know, the three-world idea is not a known perspective or theoretical position. Perhaps that would be a reason to think about it more. Maybe it’s a helpful way to understand ourselves from the inside.
One consideration is that each of the three worlds has its own version of what is real, where reality is what can be reliably and helpfully experienced. When these conflict within one mind (as they must frequently do), it could be useful to reflect on what needs the conflicting ideas met when they arose. Consider this collection of realities:
I don’t directly know anyone who’s had the plague but we are in lockdown (W0).
I don’t want to be sick or inconvenienced (W1).
I keep hearing that it’s an exaggerated threat, a political ploy (W2).
Analyzing the motives of yourself and others in such as situation can be complicated, but might help you make the right behavioral decisions.
Another consideration starts with a distinction. What is ‘the real’ is more about the feeling of experience. What is ‘the truth’ is more about what is worth believing (i.e., is trust-worthy) as a guide to our behavior. As we flit moment to moment between the different realities of W0, W1, and W2 we may be kicking around ideas to see if they are worth believing. This is not easy and can be extremely distressing. If you don’t do it at all, then you are a lost soul or a sociopath. If you do it too much and distrust the wrong things, then you can get stuck on a wrong belief.
I heard a trick question recently. What does it feel like to be wrong? The answer is not some version of: ‘It feels shameful or disappointing or bad.’ That is the answer to how does it feel to discover that you’re wrong. Just being wrong feels exactly like being right. At that point, you don’t know the difference.
Here’s a tail-chasing kind of paradox: W0 consists of direct perceptual experience. But many important things are mediated: we don’t always have direct experience of environmental decay, economic dynamics, adverse prejudice, other peoples’ covid-19, etc. So what we believe about W0 needs to partake of experience in the other worlds. For most people, it seemingly involves very little W1 thinking. Rather, it boils down to which (mediated, W2) talking heads they trust.
But, by trusting a talking head we kind of give them admission into W0. This means that lying trolls and propagandists can become part of our base reality — not a good thing. If there’s a cure for trusting the wrong sources then it has to involve what happens in W1, where we have the chance to think critically about things.
For example, the simplest kind of reasoning about our rampant conspiracy theories would say, ‘In the real world (W0) the massive scope of coordination among so many people and institutions that is needed to support any such conspiracy is just too big to happen, let alone to keep hidden. Besides that, it is preposterous that so many people would be evil in the same way.’ That’s a W1 kind of reasoning that could be taught in school.
Approaching the Truth Via Meta-Awareness
Given that you live in three worlds, is there something about you that is the center, the meeting place? There is, but it takes effort to get there.
In each of the three worlds, there are mental states that, even in everyday life, are sticky: once you are in them it’s hard to get out. For W0 the sticky state is called flow, where you are absorbed in what you’re doing. In W2 you can also get absorbed, following a plot or musical theme, for example, or binge-watching. You could even call it outer-directed flow. In W1 the prototypical sticky state is called mind-wandering, being lost in memory or imagination.
We spend nearly all of our waking time stuck in one of these states. Research says that mind-wandering alone takes up more than half.
In each of the three worlds, you have awareness. You also have what Metzinger calls attentional agency. With mental effort, you can turn your attention to the fact of that awareness. You become meta-aware, or in popular terms, mindful: an observer of yourself.
Meta-awareness is the closest thing you have to a center. It lets you have cognitive agency, to control what you are thinking about. So, doing the work to be meta-aware/mindful might be the best start on sorting out the truth from your multiple realities.